Obscured by Clouds. The rough and ready blog of a cloud benighted biologist and amateur astronomer. Astroblog will cover my interests in astronomy, biology and Life, the Universe and Everything.

Monday, June 03, 2013

Comet C/2011 L4 PanSTARRS Mosaic 2 June 2012

My mosaic of Comet C/2011 L4 PanSTARRS, 2 June 2012. Images taken with iTelescope T14. Each image is 5x120sec exposures, stacked in ImageJ then a median Z-project applied. the separate images were then stacked and rotated in GIMP.

The tail of comet PanSTARRS stretches over 5 degrees across the sky, pointing to Polaris. This is my second mosaic of this marvellous comet, but my previous one was too short and light contaminated. After bouts of bad weather and an embarrassing night where I couldn't work out which way the comets tail was pointing (and thus taking lots of images of empty sky), I finally got this beauty.